The fall exhibition is dedicated to three artists who deserve to be (re)discovered: Anneliese Hager, Nan Hoover, and Maria Lassnig. Three artists who expressed themselves experimentally and innovatively in various media and who were interested in alienation effects, the perception of the body, and a reflection on time and space. All three engaged early on with surrealism and found their way to an individual visual language in different ways: they all share an engagement with light, space and the body, and the existential question of self-perception and their place in the world.
Anneliese Hager (1904–1997) was fascinated by the surrealist and abstract photography of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. So she began experimenting with techniques of photographic printing and to illustrate her own surrealist poetry with these photograms, defamiliarizing objects of everyday life to create abstract compositions. Hager has remained virtually unknown until today, in part because her early works were destroyed by the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
The Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is today one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, but only achieved her international breakthrough late in life, in the 1980s.
After the Second World War, she tried her hand at Informel art, engaged in Paris with surrealism, but soon found her genuine subject: the human body and the self-portrait. In the 1980s, she discovered so-called “bodyawareness pictures,” making her a pioneer of feminist body art.
The American artist Nan Hoover (1931–2008) is one of the pioneers of international light, video, and performance art. Her early works, which remained largely unknown to the public, were influenced by surrealist painting. In performances, video works, and light installations from the early 1970s onward, she approached a minimalist formal language based on reduction and reflection in which time is interpreted and underscored by way of the medium of light using extreme slowness and space.
In cooperation with:
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass.
Maria Lassnig Stiftung, Vienna
Sebastian Fath Contemporary, Mannheim
Curator: Dr. Inge Herold
Funded by:
